Kyle's THG Update - February 2023

Hi folks, Kyle here again!

Over the last month or so I've made some faster progress than usual, though there's still a long, long path ahead. Here's a quick rundown of what's been done:

SHELL PLATING

I mostly finished adjusting the bottom shell plating of the hull. This involved adjusting the meshes to better fit where they overlap and making cuts at certain overlapping corners, as well as smoothing the meshes. The goal was to get the plates to the point that at least all those under the double bottom floors would be relatively finished, and it's pretty much at that point. You'll see this mostly-finished bottom plating in some of the attached images. Pay no mind to the antifouling color. The floors themselves will need their own round of adjusting, but for now I'm working on some other stuff before doing that...

TANK TOP PLATING

I've been working hard on getting the Tank Top plated up. The Tank Top is the lowermost deck of the ship upon which the engines, boilers, and other equipment sit. Like the hull, it's made of of many thin steel plates (the same goes for the other decks). I've nearly finished laying down these plates in their rough form and, once that's done, I will be going over them to polish the models a bit more.

For now, the addition of Tank Top plating really rounds out our foundation so far. It's been enlightening referring to the various iron plans we have to get the layout right, and there are some fuzzy areas I still need to figure out. Other areas are easier, particularly the thick, flat steel plates the reciprocating engines are bolted to.

This plating is also some of the first truly visible stuff to be made, as a lot of this plating will be visible in various areas, particularly coal bunkers, cargo holds, and water tanks. In other areas the plating is mostly covered by raised floor gratings, the but equipment is still bolted to the Tank Top plating.

VISUALIZATION

To help show the scale of the ship and what the Tank Top was used for, I also brought in the old models of the boilers from our previous demos, as well as the extremely rough engines from Demo 401. Keep in mind these are NOT final models, they're placeholders here meant for visualization only. It will probably be quite some time before we actually start bringing in final boilers and engines.

GOING FORWARD

In the immediate future I will continue working on the Tank Top plating. Once that's done to a degree, I may begin the work of making the frames, the vertical "beams" that served as the ribs of Titanic's hull. I couldn't start those until I had at least some of the Tank Top plating in place. Once frames are in place, I can make the brackets that will fill in the remaining spaces fore and aft of the outboard ballast or "wing" tanks. These brackets are similar to the wing tank floors except they just connect the frames to the tank sides. At some point, I will go back and adjust the existing floors and finalize the remainder of the bottom plating.

One big thing to note is that technically none of these meshes are fully finished yet. Almost everything relies on everything else in this part of the ship and I find it will be necessary to make little adjustments to existing parts as I go along. I can't truly finalize the double bottom until everything is in place in terms of structure, and there's still stuff to do there. For example, I still have to do the intercostals, which will just be tons of fun.

MISCELLANEOUS

In January many of you may have seen a viral TikTok video going around proclaiming the Titanic/Olympic switch conspiracy theory. Normally I tend to ignore that stuff, but it was getting so much traction across the internet, Titanic communities, and even media, that I was extremely motived to do some kind of response. So, I spent around a week making a video debunking the various claims, which you can see here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHJkszsuDM4

The original TikTok video has long since been deleted, but the damage was done and these theories never go away.

For a day or two I also had to help with something Demo 401-related, but it was something quick and easy. Needless to say, my snowballing days are over and now, with a release date of March 3rd for Demo 401: Update 2.0, Derek has things well under control. Our awesome cinematics guy has also been working tons of magic as you've seen from the 401 trailers so far, and I hope you've all been enjoying them!

That's all for now! Thanks to all of you again for your continued patience and support. I know it's a slow grind, but it'll be worth it!